A Writer's Lament

 “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.”

Claude Shannon

Greer math...

My father was an engineer, a math guy. Working in the era of slide rules and mechanical adding machines, he and his friends at RCA made weather satellites in the early Sixties. Granted, he once remarked that those objects did indeed take pictures of clouds and stuff (often in Eastern Europe) but then I digress. He was a math guy, a technical thinker who was involved in America's space program.

My mom was the youngest daughter of a banker. She was a woman who kept a school lunch program in the black (even bringing me home chocolate chip cookie dough occasionally). She also kept the books at home, raising three rambunctious hockey players while knowing where every penny went. Clearly, there was math involved.

I don't know from math. When I need math to matter in one of my novels, I ask my spouse or her brother, a math teacher, for a quote. Then, I hope I don't mess it up (The Writer's Prayer). I get particularly confused when math and computing intersect. So when I tuned in - a wonderful anachronism - to watch an interview of Elon Musk about the subject of artificial intelligence (AI), it was from the perspective of a person who uses, but does not necessarily understand, the technical aspects of our digital age.

It was all interesting enough, the few parts I understood. Apparently, AI can do a lot of things well, far faster than we humans can. There are any number of areas where it is beneficial. It may even be, in some ways experts are trying to understand, smarter than us by some not entirely universal definition of smart. And then, they started to talk about writing.

I know a little something about writing. A very little. Mostly, I know it is hard to write well, harder still to write clearly and - I mean no disrespect - very hard to induce people to give you their money to read your writing. So when Elon started to point out that AI is a really good writer, he had my attention.

I've seen some of the AI writing ads on Facebook, about which I knew little. There was one post that kept appearing on LinkedIn which promised a writing program that was faster and better than actually learning how to write. And Lex Fridman, an MIT researcher, had a guy on his podcast who said he'd seen an AI program re-write "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," the result of which he pronounced remarkable. There is also an AI component in my next novel (probably Fall, thanks for asking) and so I've been a bit more attentive than usual. That wasn't what generated the "No shit?" moment.

That occurred when Mr. Musk posed an interesting question, couched in the truism that everything that can be used for humankind's good is eventually (or, not so eventually) hijacked by evil, for evil purposes. He made the point that democracy (the kind where human beings interact personally with each other, as opposed to the mega, and fanciful, partisan term Our Democracy™) is based on the principle that citizens of differing opinions try to persuade one another in good faith to come to their way of thinking. If this sounds archaic and naive... Maybe it is.

It seems obvious to me that democracy suffers from an over-reliance on meta-persuasion. That is, a point of view is deemed pervasive (and therefore persuasive) based on the number of tweets generated in support, especially if they are authored by someone about whom we have heard - an influencer, as it were. Mr. Musk suggests (by inference) - What if those aren't real people commenting, but the work of a small clique creating computer-concocted "Bots" posting an infinite array of beautifully written, deftly-crafted AI written materials? Aren't human being more likely to follow the herd, if they think the herd is going someplace cool (rather than the slaughterhouse)? I know, right?

It isn't that I don't want the competition. I have a limited number of books left in me, and write for a small group of followers that are loyal enough to pay for my latest fascination (at the moment Old Fashioneds). It isn't that I'm worried about all of the millions I might otherwise miss out on.

It's that, at least in the past, good writing was hard, and in a way intimate, and it represented the connection between two people's souls. My writing is an attempt to distill my journey through a life at the cutting edge, and pointy end, of law enforcement, to create characters with whom the reader can bond (or hate) and to bring the reader into a world we lucky few have inhabited. That a computer could do it easier, better and faster...

I love my dogs. I care about my dogs. Over the years my dogs have been my faithful writing partners. I just don't want the dog telling me what to write.